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Making your blog reading easier!

If you are anything like me, you consume information like you are drinking from a fire hose. The constant influx from social media, network news, and all of our favorite school counseling blogs can quickly become overwhelming. You may have some other similarities to me like trying to keep up with your learning efficiently. Luckily for both of us – there are ways to help streamline our information feeds and I am going to show you some of my favorite and most popular tools.

When reading blogs – you have a few different options to help you keep up with the most current posts. The most rudimentary is by occasionally (or obsessively) visiting the site to see if anything new has been posted. This is useful but can eat away at your precious time by having to go to each site to see what is new. The first tool I will share with you is what I use and think it is a great resource for all things blog/news.

Feedly: The Google Reader Replacement

Until about a year ago – I was an avid Google Reader fan. It was simple, clean, and quick. Sadly, Google stopped developing it and most of the Google Reader users flocked to Feedly.

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Feedly uses the RSS feeds (Rich Site Summary protocol) to pull new posts from each blog that you add to your Feedly account. This tool is web and mobile device friendly too.

You can easily add sites by searching for them within Feedly or by adding their RSS link directly from the blog you are wanting to read. Some helpful features include the ability to create different categories of your choosing (from food to news) and what posts you want to read. With this feature, I keep it set to only new posts so I know which I have read already. One tip: for posts you may want to save – sign up for Pocket. Pocket is a tool to help you save sites you want to read later and I love it!

If you are looking for a clean, supported, and easy to use reader – give feedly a try! I believe you will be pleased with the experience.

Bloglovin: Another popular reading tool

If feedly is not quite for you – there are quite a few school counselors out there that use Bloglovin to follow their favorite school counseling bloggers. Using the same RSS feed as feedly, Bloglovin is a website and set of mobile apps that helps you gather all of your feeds into one place. Another great feature is that it helps you find other blogs similar to what you already read that you may be interested in. Bloglovin, from my somewhat limited experience, seems to be a little less customizable that feedly – which to me is a negative. You can probably think of the two as Android (feedly) to Apple (Bloglovin). If you want to be in control of your reading content and have the ability to customize your experience – feedly will be better suited. If you just want to hit a button and go – you may enjoy Bloglovin a little more.

When finding and testing new software, I use the “give them all a shot and go with the one I like best” approach (especially when they are free!). I think you may want to do the same and see which is best suited to your reading style.

Follow by email: A little old fashioned but effective

The third and last way to follow your favorite school counseling blogs is to sign up to follow by email. Most blogs will have an option to sign up to receive new posts in your email inbox when they are published. Best for people with a few favorite blogs that they really like to read but want the content to come to them. To sign up to get blog posts through this route, find the button or box on the blog of interest and add your email address. That is it!

As you follow your own path to getting some of the great, free content out there that is available to us school counselors – take a look at a few of these apps and see what works. There are many other alternatives out there, but these are a few tried and true options for you to start with. If you find any other great tools – please comment below to share with fellow Counseling Geek readers and myself! Cheers.

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Jeff "The Counseling Geek" Ream is a school counselor in Lake Tahoe, CA/NV. Jeff also serves on the California Association of School Counselors as the technology chairperson. Use of material on this site is by express written permission only.

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